Sources: Joel Kotkin (boundaries and names of 7 mega-regions); Forbes Magazine; Regional Plan Association; Census Bureau; United States High Speed Rail Association; Clare Trainor/University of Wisconsin-Madison Cartography Laboratory.
Parag Khanna, New York Times:
To an extent, America is already headed toward a metropolis-first arrangement. The states aren’t about to go away, but economically and socially, the country is drifting toward looser metropolitan and regional formations, anchored by the great cities and urban archipelagos that already lead global economic circuits.
The 21st century will not be a competition over territory, but over connectivity — and only connecting American cities will enable the United States to win the tug of war over global trade volumes, investment flows and supply chains. More than America’s military grand strategy, such an economic master plan would determine if America remained the world’s leading superpower.
See also
- Atlas Obscura’s Guide to Literary Road Trips — A painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature.
- Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860 — Based on data from the 1860 census, this map was the Census Office’s first attempt to map population density.
